The river reflected the streetlights, and all Mina could hear was the passing traffic on the Drive. As she jogged along Riverside Park, Mina saw Mr. Dashti’s doughy hands holding his tea and his look of hesitation when their eyes met. Of course he was like all the other men: well educated, polite, careful. But there was something different this time. Maybe it was the palpable relief she saw on his face when they didn’t click. The sense that he was equally lost in this messy matchmaking business. He didn’t want it either. Poor Mr. Dashti was just as stuck as she was.
Mina’s sneakered feet hit the tarmac. How would she tell her parents about her decision to return to Iran? They would be so worried about her safety. She hadn’t been back in fifteen years. What if she was accused of being an American spy and detained? The political situation there was unpredictable. Anything could happen. But Mina had to go. She wanted to know what Agha Jan was doing every day without Mamani to cook him his meals, talk to him, sing for him Googoosh’s songs and recite Rumi’s verses. She needed to know where Bita was. What was she doing? Over the years, Mina had put that world out of her mind. Stuffed it away, just as she had shoved her oil paints into plastic storage boxes and slid them under her old bed in her parents’ house. She hadn’t had time for reflection as the dean put it. To reflect on the place where her mother had grown up in her element. Because Mina was busy building, busy striving, busy making.
After her run, she practiced the karate kicks that her brothers had taught her when they were children. After all these years, she still loved doing those kicks. She raised her leg, put it in chamber position and leaned back the way Kayvon had taught her. Then she kicked out. Imagine getting Bruce Lee in the knee, the groin, the “precious place” Kayvon had drilled into her. Don’t be afraid. Kick! Mina kicked over and over again at her imaginary opponent, then jump-switched to work her other leg.
Back in her apartment, she showered and got ready for bed. But she couldn’t sleep. Maybe she was crazy for wanting to go. What if she could never come back to her life here? She turned on the TV. A late-night talk show host swayed in his suit and made fun of the president. The audience laughed. Mina still felt a twinge of danger when Americans said negative things about their leaders. But you could get away with it here. And now she was going to go someplace where the rules were vastly different. She had to call her brother.
“How did your lunch with the latest greatest suitor go?” Kayvon asked.
“Ridiculous. Embarrassing. As always. I can’t keep doing this, Kayvon,” Mina said.
“Don’t worry, kiddo. Mom will find a new hobby soon. This spreadsheet thing is getting absurd.”
“I know.” Mina sighed. It was a relief to talk to Kayvon. She had always been closer to him than to Hooman. Maybe it was because she was only three years younger than Kayvon and six years younger than Hooman. But it was also because of her brothers’ different personalities. Kayvon was more easygoing, more relaxed. He could usually make Mina, or anyone for that matter, see the lighter side of things. Hooman was more serious. And now that they were all adults, Hooman’s schedule as a doctor didn’t leave him much time for small talk. Ever since he got married, he had even less time.
“She never did this with Hooman. Or you. Right? I mean, Hooman’s married to an American. Your girlfriend’s from Brooklyn. Why do I have to be matched with the perfect Persian? It is such a double standard.”
“You’re her favorite, that’s why. She just wants to see you settled. Happy. She’s obsessed.”
“Isn’t it enough that I’m in business school? You know, Kayvon, I’ve been thinking. I have this idea. I really want to . . .”
“Oh no, not this again,” Kayvon said. “Mina, you know you can’t be an artist. Don’t sweat it so much. We all have childhood dreams and then we grow up. I wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I’m a contracts lawyer! That’s life. We all make choices, but it’s for the best, you’ll see. Now get some sleep.”
Before Mina could even tell Kayvon about her plan to go to Iran, he’d said good night and good-bye.
So much for her buddy brother. Mina sighed and reopened the photo album she’d taken out before her run, the only one they’d brought from Iran. Darya had cleverly hidden photos of herself behind pictures of the kids so that the customs inspectors wouldn’t confiscate the photos with no hijab. Darya in her bikini was hidden behind Hooman in a high chair. Darya with long flowing hair, her arm linked with Baba’s, was stuck behind a shot of Kayvon playing soccer. And photos of Darya at university, in her cotton blouse and billowing skirt, books hugged to her chest, were behind snapshots of Mina’s early artwork.
The album helped link Mina to a past that felt almost glamorous. There was the mother she’d once known. Her hair black, not red. Her hazel eyes bright, hopeful. Darya looked happy, confident. Not tired and foreign. The Darya dressed in Jackie O jackets and pillbox hats was such a very different woman from the Darya of Queens. There she was standing by a fountain in Isfahan, her black hair blowing wild, a tiny Hooman and Kayvon by her side. There they all were on a London double-decker bus, waving. They didn’t need visas back then. The world at that time didn’t confuse them with terrorists. Mina pulled out an older photo: Darya in a hospital bed holding a scrunched-up newborn wrapped in a Mamani-knitted receiving blanket. It was their first moment on camera together. When Mina held the photo close, she noticed that Darya looked completely exhilarated and overwhelmed.
In America, the mother, father, brothers, and previous self that Mina had known before the revolution slowly melted away and evaporated. They became like characters she’d read about in a book, people who lived in a different land, long ago.
“You know we’re going back,” Baba would say some mornings in those early years as he ironed his pizza apron. “As soon as this revolution thing dies down.” Hooman would concentrate on his cereal and mumble, “That’s what you said a year ago.” Mina would think of her blue suitcase under her bed, ready to be filled with her clothes and paint set so she could return home to Bita and Agha Jan and Aunt Nikki and all the rest of her family and friends at any given moment.
When the TV host delivered his punch line, the studio roared with laughter and Mina was jolted back to the present. Young women in the audience clapped and flipped back their hair. Big men in baseball hats guffawed and hooted. What had she missed? What was so funny? What did those girls in the air-conditioned California studio do after the show? Go to a bar and sit on skinny stools and order drinks? Mina knew about the ancient Persian poets: Saadi, Rumi, and Hafez. She knew about bombs in Tehran in the 1980s. But she couldn’t name more than one cocktail. She had never been comfortable inside bars. Darya and Baba found the bar culture unseemly. Wouldn’t want her sitting on a skinny bar stool swinging her legs. Mina knew how to study and work very hard. She knew how to swing her legs on that hyphen that defined and denied who she was: Iranian-American. Neither the first word nor the second really belonged to her. Her place was on the hyphen, and on the hyphen she would stay, carrying memories of the one place from which she had come and the other place in which she must succeed. The hyphen was hers—a space small, potentially precarious. On the hyphen she would sit and on the hyphen she would stand and soon, like a seasoned acrobat, she would balance there perfectly, never falling, never choosing either side over the other, content with walking that thin line.
But to now jump off the hyphen and return to Iran required vaulting over a few hurdles. She had to get her paperwork straight and trust that despite some horror stories of Iranian exiles going back and being imprisoned, she’d be safe. More important, she had to convince her parents that their daughter’s going to the Islamic Republic for winter break was an absolutely brilliant idea.